I don’t think I’ve ever been more wrong than when I was booed in a synagogue around twenty years ago. The occasion was a panel on media bias against Israel. One of the audience had asked a question about the BBC’s ‘institutional anti-Semitism’ and I responded – I shudder now to think how wrong I was – that while it was obviously biased against Israel, that reflected the left-liberal mindset of the overwhelming majority of its newsroom rather than anti-Semitism as such.

The years since the Hamas massacre on 7 October 2023 have been an object lesson in how wrong I was. The BBC’s reports have consistently repeated Hamas propaganda as fact, as with its international editor Jeremy Bowen’s coverage of the alleged bombing of a hospital in Gaza on 17 October that year. Hamas claimed an Israeli airstrike led to the blast, which it said killed at least 500 people. Bowen reported on BBC One’s News at Ten that:

The problems with the BBC’s on-screen reporting do not come out of nowhere

The problems with the BBC’s on-screen reporting do not come out of nowhere

The missile hit the hospital not long after dark. You can hear the impact. The explosion destroyed Al-Ahli hospital. It was already damaged from a smaller attack at the weekend. The building was flattened.

The missile hit the hospital not long after dark. You can hear the impact. The explosion destroyed Al-Ahli hospital.........

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